Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Executions Scheduled in Alabama, Arizona

Attorneys for a 45-year-old inmate have asked the Alabama Supreme Court to stop his scheduled Thursday execution, in part because the jury recommended that the judge spare the man's life and sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

William Glenn Boyd was convicted of the 1986 shooting deaths of Fred and Evelyn Blackmon in Calhoun County.

The Alabama Supreme Court had not ruled by Monday evening on Boyd's request for a stay of execution.

Boyd is scheduled to die by lethal injection at Holman Prison in Atmore at 6 p.m. Thursday.

Defense attorneys say the execution should be stopped because the judge violated rules set out by the Alabama and U.S. Supreme Courts in sentencing Boyd to die despite the jury recommendation of life in prison.

"Mr. Boyd's death sentence is invalid because the trial court's override of the jury's verdict for life without parole did not comply with requirements of Alabama and federal law," the motion read.

The sentencing issue grows out of the 2002 Supreme Court case of Ring v. Arizona and the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Schriro v. Summerlin, that Ring did not apply retroactivley.

An Arizona death-row inmate is set to be executed Tuesday for killing two people in a 1989 convenience store robbery, marking one of the state’s last lethal injections to use a three-drug cocktail after officials said they will switch to a single-drug method.

Eric John King, 47, was scheduled to die at 10 a.m. at the state prison in Florence. He has maintained his innocence since his arrest, and lawyers were still fighting to get his execution delayed.

The Arizona Supreme Court declined to stay his execution Monday after defense attorney Michael Burke argued that the state should wait until it enacts its new lethal injection protocol.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan announced Friday that Arizona will switch to using just one drug to allay any “perceived concerns” that sodium thiopental is ineffective, but that won’t start until after the scheduled executions of King and Daniel Wayne Cook on April 5.

Defense attorney Michael Burke had argued that the Department of Corrections may have engaged in fraud when it imported the sedative from Great Britain by listing it on forms as being for “animals (food processing),” not humans. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said the mislabeling resulted from a clerical error.

Arizona obtained the drug legally, and that’s why it has been able to avoid problems other states have had, Assistant Attorney General Kent Cattani has said. Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental was seized by federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents on March 15 over questions about how it was obtained.

The drug is part of the three-drug lethal injection cocktail used by nearly all 34 death penalty states, but it became scarce last year after the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped making it.

Some states started obtaining sodium thiopental overseas, and lawyers have argued that potentially adulterated, counterfeit or ineffective doses could subject prisoners to extreme pain.

Texas and Oklahoma recently announced they are switching from sodium thiopental to pentobarbital in their three-drug protocol. Ohio has switched to using only pentobarbital for its executions, and Ryan said that’s the drug Arizona might start using.

Burke said Monday that he was asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state court’s denial of a stay, and a ruling was expected Tuesday morning.

The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency on Monday unanimously rejected a request to reconsider a reprieve for Death Row inmate Eric John King, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday in Florence.

Attorneys for King raised issues regarding last week's discovery that two of the drugs obtained for execution were listed on import documents as animal drugs. That information came out of responses to Freedom of Information requests to U.S. Customs and Border Protection received simultaneously by The Arizona Republic and the Federal Public Defender's Office last week.

Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan met with The Republic on Friday to explain that the mislabeling that occurred three times on shipments a month apart was a clerical error made by an employee of a local import broker who struggled to fill out forms that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration presents to Customs to clear shipments.

Ryan also produced an e-mail from Robert Hornyan, president of Arizona Customs Brokers in Phoenix, in which Hornyan said when his "entry clerk filled out the FDA screen, he misclassified it. He put the letter L in the code instead of the letter C, which put it in the animal category instead of human."

But at Monday's hearing, attorney Michael Burke of the Federal Public Defender's Office gave a Power Point presentation of the computer-assisted form used in drug imports.

Burke showed various drop-down menus related to the drug sodium thiopental. The menu for the drug's use contains about 15 choices that are grouped and clearly marked for animal and human uses, described in phrases, and not by mere letters.

"It is highly unlikely that on three separate forms, the Department of Corrections made the exact same error," Burke said.

The Republic first became aware of Hornyan and his company in October, though Hornyan denied his company was involved in importing thiopental from England.

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.